Made it out for the Ignite MPLS event last night. Saw a couple TCMaker faces across the press of hipsters but arriving near the kickoff time and trying to find a seat for my pregnant wife made chatting a bit tough.

The twitter wall reminded me of what I think of twitter. I was somewhat disappointed by the talks, not sure what I expected but more meaty, cool, maker type talks would have floated my boat. The home theater one was the only one that I saw that fit that bill, although the write a novel one was close. Was it just me or did most of the presenters know each other or what? And a presentation on cell phone options? It did provide 5 minutes to get a beer though, good stuff that Surly. I liked the idea of the woods talk, but the execution was a little flat. We had to step out at halftime. Anything notable in the second act?

So any other reports?

Overall, the experience made me want to get TCMaker hosting an alternative (smaller, and RSVP only) event with fast-paced meaty talks, beer, and no font critiques.

i had a bunch of fun talking to to random folks, and a few talks were good, but for the most part they were more stand up or presentations to boards than informative.

the fonts thing *could* have been interesting- talking about what makes a good or bad font, and why folks use bad fonts, but ended up being a diatribe against comic sans. most of the talks fell into that vein, where a neat idea was not followed into an interesting and educational direction.

bills talk was pretty on target aside from a few inaccuracies, but i wasn't wowed by any others. they were fun, but the banter with folks was more interesting.

i agree, we need to do this, RSVP only (open to public but no walk ins) but we need to do some coaching for the presenters.

I was there for fun and I had fun, a few of the presentations were yawners, but you had to admire them for putting it out there. It would certainly be cool to have something like that from people that actually make what they are talking about, a couple seemed pretty pointless.

It was great hanging out and goofing off with #tcmaker.

I liked the wall, for better or worse it would have been a completely different scene without it.

Agreed, the event had a very cool sounding board energy due to the conversation in the back and the Twitterwall. It was a very survival of the fittest thing. I see it encouraging better presentations and really requiring people to be engaging. I tend to be a bit hard of hearing, but did not find much difficulty hearing any of the presentations if I just stood a bit closer and/or concentrated. I actually think that they could have made the halftime break a wee bit longer so that people could mingle more. There were some good conversations that stemmed from that.

I definitely think that we need to be up there next time selling ourselves. There were quite a few influential people (both monetarily and web-personality-wise) that could be very very helpful to our cause... of course, that would require one of us to actually get up in front of people and talk.